8 comments:

Capt Sudhir
said...

Hi Wan,

Just to correct a wrong perception. There are no Aryan or Dravidian races. Those who did not understand Sanskrit, came up with the theory of Aryan Invasion of India in the late 19th and early 20th century.

The fact is there is no Aryan race described in Sanskrit. There is Arya which means a person (not race) of noble character. Dravida means a person from the land arising of waters. It is also used to mean he who receives all noble things bestowed. Thank you Eid Mubarak.

The often perceived and frequently quoted racial division in India between the fairer Aryan North and the darker Dravidian South is pernicious and dangerous. The British gave currency to this view of racial divide in India. It was part of their “divide and rule” strategy. The Northern people in India got especially sucked into this interpretation of history because it made the “Aryan” northerners appear racially closer to the white races of Europe. This viewpoint is also popular in Sri Lanka, where the Singhalese believe that they are descendants of Aryans from the North of India and that Tamils of Sri Lanka are not. New interpretations of ancient Indian history do not accept the view that Aryans entered India from the outside. New information rejects the notion that the Dravidian people were the conquered races, or that the Dravidians were pushed down south by the invading Aryans.

Hindus collectively have no memory of an Aryan invasion of India that supposedly took place around 1,500 B.C. Hindu epics do not mention any such invasion. Surely, the extensive Hindu literature would describe the Aryan invasions if such had indeed taken place.

ecent DNA evidence further negates the Aryan invasion theory. Dr. Subhash Kak summarizes recent research as follows: Advances in genetics have made it possible to trace ancient migrations. It is now generally accepted that modern man arose in Africa about 200,000 years ago and from there spread first into India and Southeast Asia by coastal migration that probably included some boat crossings. There are several estimates of the time when this spread into India took place. According to the geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer, settlements in India appear about 90,000 years ago. From India there were later northeastern and northwestern migrations into Eurasia and the Far East. The new findings turn on its head the previous view of the origin of Indians. The earlier view, popular in Indian history books, was that the Indian population came in two waves from the northwest around four or five thousand years ago, displacing the earlier aboriginals, descendents of regional archaic groups. . . The new view is that subsequent to the rise of modern mankind in Africa, it found a second home in India, which is the point of migration for the populations of Europe, North Africa, China and Japan. The migrants in India slowly adapted to the wide climatic conditions in the sub-continent (from the tropical to the extreme

Most Indian groups descend from a mixture of two genetically divergent populations: Ancestral North Indians (ANI) related to Central Asians, Middle Easterners, Caucasians, and Europeans; and Ancestral South Indians (ASI) not closely related to groups outside the subcontinent. The date of mixture is unknown but has implications for understanding Indian history. We report genome-wide data from 73 groups from the Indian subcontinent and analyze linkage disequilibrium to estimate ANI-ASI mixture dates ranging from about 1,900 to 4,200 years ago. In a subset of groups, 100% of the mixture is consistent with having occurred during this period. These results show that India experienced a demographic transformation several thousand years ago, from a region in which major population mixture was common to one in which mixture even between closely related groups became rare because of a shift to endogamy.

The date for the admixture seems a bit too recent to assume tight linkage with the Indus Valley Civilization. I mean, the upper range for the ASI/ANI admixture in this model is 2,000 BC. By this time the "mature" period of the IVC was virtually over. It had essentially collapsed entirely by 1300 BC, which isn't even in the mid-range of admixture dates. Instead, based upon the dates alone, you'd presume the mixture between the two groups happened because of the fall of the IVC, not the rise.

Say some Near Eastern farmers migrated into the Indus Valley region from Persia near the dawn of agriculture. They found native populations living there, but they rather quickly displaced them with minimal admixture, leaving largely "pure" hunter gatherers to their east, in the zone less well-adapted to Near Eastern crops.

Centuries later, some mixture of Aryan incursions and drought caused the cities to be abandoned. The Dravida migrate to their west and south in search of better agricultural lands. They do not find these lands as empty as their ancestors found the Indus, as the locals have picked up some limited Neolithic knowledge. But they have enough of an advantage to dominate the new "mixed-race" polities, and impose their language.

They don't stay ahead of the Aryan wave however, which ultimately sweeps over most of the Indo-Gangetic plain. The Aryans form what amounts to an empire of the word, if not a formal empire, linking together a huge region culturally and linguistically. This causes backflow of ASI-admixed people into the Indus Valley. Still, the level of ASI-admixture stays lower because the area was never fully abandoned. But today, the line between those with higher versus lower ANI still does roughly follow the Pakistan/India border - an echo of the IVC.

The problem with such a scenario, however, is the admixture between the ASI/ANI components would have to be nearly concurrent - at most a few centuries apart. If the two happened basically concurrently wouldn't we not be able to detect them at all?

It might be interesting to remind that the oldest written bits of early indo-iranian (and likely indo-aryan actually) were found in north Syria, in the Mitanni kingdom, around 1500 BCE. They were invaders and were speaking Hurrian, a non-IE language (but indo-aryan words - especially related to horse and chariot - and Vedic gods' names were used in a treaty and a manual for horse-training. It's important to note that the Mitanni kings took Indo-aryan king names (even when they had formerly a Hurrian name) when going onto the throne. The name of their capital Waššukanni was also derived from old Indo-aryan words meaning "Wealth Mine" (Vasu-Khani)).

These invaders apparently came from the north, i.e. in the general direction of the _south Caucasus_.

Again the presumptuous link goes from DNA to language. Well for all the amount of pseudo-scientific literature accumulated on this myth ; - the exactness of the Sanskrit repository has proven time and time again that this was NOT a foreign group of people coming in to off set the locals but rather an evolution of the same group of people and verified by the DNA. The mixture of DNA here refers to a much earlier period.

And oh yes those dates of 1,900 to 4,200 years are not proven at all. In fact the researchers can only conclude "The evidence that most Indians are genetically alike, even though anthropological data show that Indian groups tend to marry within their own group, is "very puzzling", the study can't establish a rough date for when the ancient mixing between the two ancestral populations took place. There are very curious features of the data that are hard to explain,"

What is correctly determined is dates (By the constellation position) in the Vedas correspond to a much older civilisation. And the Sarasvathy did flow in India (not Syria, not Russia or any part of Europe) at a time much older.

If you understand Sanskrit all you have to do is follow one of the paths it will lead to the knowledge as you will be able to know for your self the inherent oneness of this group of people and at the same time not denying the oneness of the whole human race.